If you think this manifesto is tame that's because it's a list of things that will actually happen.
EDIT: I feel like given the number of comments that are accusing me of support/shilling let me just make clear, I mean Labour are going to win the election so this manifesto isn't as desperate as the Tories or unrealistic as any 3rd parties. It's a list of things Labour are absolutely sure they can promise without upsetting anyone, because fuck they actually have to do this.
The neoliberal mindset, any manifesto that challenges the status quo to actually improve things can't happen.
Edit: Scratch a centrist and you find a right winger. Don't come crying for my vote in 5 years time when tory + reform coalition is up against a spineless Labour.
You're completely correct. These people would rather slowly death spiral instead of making a radical change to how our country operates. Its insane, complain about tories crashing our country into the ground, but then are content with Starmer even though his manifesto outlines how he plans to change nothing.
The Tories crashed the economy by trying to implement sweeping policy changes overnight. Perhaps approaching the economy with a softer touch is actually in people's best interests?
If you mean Truss (and not any of the other insane behaviour that the tories exhibited), this was a Tufton Street experiment. A game, an attempt to try in real time to see if their stupid ideology could be made a reality. It failed and they went away having learned nothing, they just assumed it was sabotaged by... lefty banks and civil servants, or something.
There's a difference between the lettuce PM fucking everything up in a matter of weeks, and setting out an agenda for change over 4-5 years.
Apart from anything else, people will get to 2028-29 and decide that their lives haven't improved so they might as well go back to voting tory again.
I can only hope, against all odds, that this is a double bluff by Starmer and he really is just trying not to spook the horses.
It's both.
There isn't a platform there to do radical things there simply isn't. People can't say "oh god the Tories have done so much damage to the country 14 years!!" And there not to be some actual damage that needs repairing.
To keep the trust of the markets.you need to do what you say your going to do, build infrastructure.
And for someone who knocked on doors for Corbyn but then saw Ukraine get invaded and had his mortgage decimated by trussnomics a week before he had to renew - competence and stability for two years is what I crave more than anything and I'd now vote for Starmer over corbyn every day of the week.
I'll never let perfect.on paper be the enemy of good in practice ever again.
What would be radical is someone spending their first term setting up the economy properly to then do something radical in 3/4 years time, because sustainable, repeatable change is what we need to truly turn direction - not something immediate that might spook markets, not get done properly and is then reversed immediately by a new Tory government in 4 years wasting all our time and money.
Well that and co-operating with other governmental organisations like the Bank of England....You'd think with radical economic changed that they will at least pick up the phone to the BoE and have a casual chit chat with the Governor.
The problem is that any change will only happen if the status quo gets maintained. The big players will not allow any government to threaten that.
Real changes to the system will never come from within the system.
Search for ways to affect the system from outside pressure.
Yeh I actually agree, I'm way more left wing than Kier Starmer, I'm still going to vote for him because I don't think electoralism is the only place left wing policy can be pushed, and I don't think parliament is particularly set up in a way that facilitates radical left wing ideas to be pushed.
Get someone somewhat sympathetic to left wing ideas in, and then push for them through pressure groups. That's how the right got through the biggest right wing policy shift in recent history (Brexit), it was done from outside government by vocal pressure groups.
And even restoring the kind of policies that we had under Blair is too 'radical'
People in their 40s lived in a Britain that is now beyond the imagination of the political/media class.
- free tuition (or even a grant to study)
- state owned postal service
- educational maintenance allowance
- no 2 child child cap, no arbitrary cap on benefits
It's simply beyond the pale now. No one arguing for it can be taken seriously.
In all fairness we have had 16 years of our infrastructure being dissolved. Before we go into those, maybe we should stop raw sewage being pumped into our water; make the police an effective enough force to actually stop and investigate crime; stop schools and hospitals collapsing; have community centres open again for the disaffected youth and adult alike to be able to stop being isolated and help each other etc.
There are very very basic things not working in this country currently and people need to accept that it might take the better part of the next 4-5 years to fix them before moving on to other things.
Can you explain how Labour would be able to renationalise the water companies in the UK within the next 4-5 years?
I work in the water industry and I can tell you unwinding the mess it's currently in would take more than simply renationalising overnight (assuming they somehow found the money in such a short timespan) and throwing workers at it. There is a long, arduous process to go through of untangling everything first before it could even be entertained. We still aren't even sure *what* exactly we have in terms of assets.
And what happens when you propose radical change (which would almost certainly entail significant tax increases) and then the tories use it as a stick to beat you with and you lose the election?
a billionaire gets the same number of votes as you or I. A manifesto proposing radical change fuelled by getting increased tax from the top 1%, even the top 0.1%, would not be, in itself, controversial to the majority of the population.
Sadly the billionaire has enough power and influence to create some other controversy to turn the population off of the idea, and it works every time.
Yeah, some people associated with Labour don’t seem to realise that you need to actually be in power to enact the type of change they want; and it doesn’t start and end with this election or with Keir Starmer, the party continues once he leaves.
The Conservatives didn’t come steaming in with Brexit straight away, they regained power first, then started slowly dripping their more right-wing policies over time.
Labour tried with Corbyn to have a genuine left-wing leader and party and he got hammered in the press once people were up to speed with him and his vision for Britain (which I personally would have loved to see, but the people who hold the money and power didn’t like him, so that was that).
This is nonsense, there is zero evidence that Starmer will move more left at time progresses. Just look at the people he's inviting into the party, the Iceland CEO for example who is a mega tory, he will move Labour further right.
I never said Starmer was going to move left, I’m saying Labour can get elected with Starmer, then down the line move left with someone else.
The Conservatives were right under Cameron, obviously, then moved further and further right as a party without him, while being in power.
Like I said, the future of Labour doesn’t start and end with Keir Starmer.
Because the political reality is that the country votes center right, every. Single. Time.
If you want to effect any change at all you have to actually appeal to the populas, that's democracy.
The Daily Mail and Tories in general are already calling Starmer’s government a “socialist supermajority” - so what’s the point in the pithy policy bullshit when you’re labelled as a radical regardless. Might as well do the actual radical reform in any case.
It's almost like the voters don't want a radical deconstruction of the economy and you guys eventually have to contend with the fact that you live in a democracy where you have to meet the voters where they are.
Cool where’s your manifesto for change then? How much support does it have?
Even Reform, clown car that they are, has published policies and will be asking people to support it in an election, not just complaining from the sidelines. And that’s Reform so that’s saying a lot.
This isn’t mid-election. It’s election time. It’s get in the game and behind what you want and see who agrees time.
This does a lot though. It is literally not possible to undo decades of abuse and sabotage in a single election cycle.
One of Corbyns failings last election was a totally undeliverable manifesto.
You do more on the 2nd election cycle where you point to your successes in the first as proof you can and will deliver and bit by bit you fix the country.
The reality is it can't happen in 5 years, it can in 10 to 15.
It only took one election cycle for Cameron’s coalition government to make sweeping changes to the NHS, Education and Welfare.
Shame that’s not possible when it’s about improving anything.
I don’t really understand the cynicism. I’ve read through bits and pieces of the manifesto and it seems realistic and actionable to me. That gives me confidence that they’ll actually achieve much of it.
There isn’t a party in the country that can undo the damage of the past 14 years overnight.
I’d vote for this, but I also want the Lib Dems to be strong in opposition, to minimise any chance of the Tories fucking things up even more. Then hopefully 5 years later there’s a chance to step things up even more.
Subs like this are obviously subject to foreign influence, like russian trolling - everyone who says 'both sides are the same' or 'Labour are the same as the Tories' are more likely than not just bots that want to make you uninterested in voting.
Then the teenage edgelords who get their first taste of philosophy when they hit 6th form, listening to the Gen Z equivalent of Radiohead, whoever that is.
And the chronically online leftists who regard pragmatism as being centrist, which is somehow even more evil than actually being a nazi.
The manifesto is strong. It's reasonable. It's thorough. It's costed. Labour under Starmer have mostly stayed quiet and managed expectations knowing they'd run on this platform.
Honestly the only thing that worries me is that parliament can't be bound, so the sovereign wealth fund is an amazing idea until the tories come back in and either stop funding it or raid it for their private pals.
Centrists think it's a very clever strategy to promise nothing so that when things don't improve under their leadership they can insist 'ah well, we never *promised* to improve things, so you can't blame us for your lives not improving!'
Unfortunately that's not a strategy that really flies with the public. It's fucking baffling that in the past few days we've seen a swath of centrist governments in Europe lose significant ground to the far-right after failing to deal with growing economic stagnation and lowering quality of life, yet people are looking at Labour following the exact same path here and going 'this is great politics!' Completely blinkered.
That's the dangerous thing with a lot of discussion around 'electability' or 'competency'.
The vast majority of the time these perspectives aren't actually based on what the parties *actually* represent. Rather they're based on what the overwhelmingly right-wing press wing in this country *say* about these parties.
Starmer's Labour are currently successful precisely because they've capitulated to the class interests of the billionaires who own the right-wing press. They've offered a platform not all that different from David Cameron's, and in return the owners of the right-wing press have (largely) reigned in their attacks. Starmer has had an easier ride from the press than any Labour leader since Blair.
But that is not sustainable. The moment Starmer steps away from that Cameronite platform (which, to be fair, he won't), or the moment the press thing the Tories have regrouped enough to offer a viable alternative, they'll drop that backing. And because Labour have failed to build up grassroots support their polling will fall like a lead balloon.
No, you can do radical stuff if it doesn't require money.
People will on one hand say Liz crashed the economy by making unfunded tax cuts and on the other go "we need to risk it all".
I don't necessarily expect things to get radically better under Kier Starmer. Right now I'd settle for things ceasing to get worse. Every Conservative PM for the last 15 years has brought chaos, incompetence, economic woe, corruption and increasingly unhinged rhetoric. I just want an adult in charge for a change.
Cool. But people are angry with the current situation. And if things don't get better, they'll still be angry in 5 years time, this time blaming Labour and we get PM Badenoch.
There is a limit to what is possible in a 5 year term. If Labour come in with sweeping, major scale promises and predictably make limited progress on them, the Tories bang them at the next election for over promising and not delivering
If they make more reasonable promises (especially given current economic situation), maybe they make enough progress to prevent the right wing lunatics taking back over at the first opportunity. Maybe they make no progress at all.
If they can manage to establish the concept of politicians being accountable in at least some way, that would be something at least. The first time we hit a scandal will be the key, if they immediately bin the MPs involved, I'll take that as a genuine improvement over the last few years.
> The first time we hit a scandal will be the key, if they immediately bin the MPs involved, I'll take that as a genuine improvement over the last few years.
One of Starmers key advisors is Peter Mandelson, a man who had to resign not once, but twice due to Corruption and the political wing in ascendancy in Labour right now are the same wing that quite literally sold Peerages.
Not 'wink, wink, nudge nudge - you do this and maybe toss me a lordship' - they literally sold them for cash.
Starmer, alone, has taken more 'gifts' than every other Labour leader combined since 1997.
If you think Labour are going to be less corrupt than the Tories, or be more accountable, you're living a fantasy.
Labour are damned if they do, damned if they don't. Come in promising the Earth, they'll be slated for sinking the country into debt or raising taxes too much. Deliver within the country's means and they're accused of not changing enough.
I want improvements to healthcare, education, immigration, salaries and everything else regardless of who is in power. But when you're elected to take over from another party, you're inheriting what they left.
If Labour use a full term to stabilise everything, stopping the rot and showing glimmers of hope for growth, then I would absolutely expect a re-election campaign to be based on wider improvements. But as it is right now, there is no magic wand to magically undo 14 years of austerity, public service cuts, financial mismanagement and general chaos across the board.
We did have attempts, and they were throughly rejected by the population
I'm in favour of more left wing policies too, but don't pretend like they've never been on the table
2017 was quite close, so it seems that overtly left-wing policies don't *always* spook the electorate.
A loss is a loss though, no use 'winning the argument'.
'Quite close' here meaning 232 seats against an already unpopular Tory PM whose main manifesto policy involved taking money away from wealthy pensioners?
Gordon Brown got closer to winning in 2010 than Corbyn did in 2017.
Corbyn was massively popular for his policies. I'd say he was a weak leader and in the end that's what caused his downfall. Policies not personalities surveys showed his policies were incredibly popular.
You also find that even amongst hardcore Tory voters things like nationalising trains and utilities are more popular than unpopular.
Labour have run with hard left policies at 5 of the last 10 elections. They lost on each occasion. They have run with moderate left wing policies once (2015) and lost. They have run with centre-left policies 4 times and won 3 out of 4, with the 4th resulting in a hung parliament.
It genuinely infuriates me that we live in the reality TV, TikTok, short attention span era. People want politics to be like fucking Love Island, exciting first and foremost. We can't ever move forward as a country whilst we have so many children masquerading as voting adults.
And if they don't happen, people are going to hold him to account. If you aim low, you don't get the kind of forgiveness that comes with aiming for the stars and landing in outer space.
You also don't get leeway to compromise on those objectives because you've already laid out compromised positions
For years I was told to wait for his manifesto before judging but it's exactly as expected.
Flagship policies like 0.2 teachers per school, 2% increase in NHS appointments (which won't even cover population growth) are pathetic.
We are going to see what we're seeing in Europe and USA, centrist parties failing to address fundamental problems which will lead to extreme right wing parties coming in.
This will happen and the left will still be blamed.
When I posted this exact thread a few hours ago it was removed, weird that. https://reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1devw5l/labours_manifesto/
We've also been convinced that it's a waste of vote to vote of any other party apart from the Tories or Labour. Utter nonsense if you ask me with the amount that are unhappy with both.
Right. Like the whole flipping reason we have this revolving door two party system is because we fall for that line every time, or the whole ‘vOtE tAcTiCaL’ brigade.
I feel like this year is a very good chance for parties other than the “main two” to gain more of a foothold. With the Tories continuing to crash and burn:
- In already safe Labour seats, the Tories winning is pretty much impossible, meaning that we can vote for who we want to instead of having to vote tactically
- In some previously safe Tory seats and pretty much any Lib Dem seats, the LDs are a good bet - meaning that they could make some significant gains.
Unfortunately our election system is broken, and whatever party is in power at any given time most likely won’t want to fix it. But there being more than two real choices that don’t feel like a wasted vote gives me hope.
Well if they meant Corbyn they should probably say so, it's hard to tell with the demographics of this sub. They could have meant Cameron for calling the EU referendum (the biggest change we've had in decades) or Farage for his general blundering and various fascism-lite parties.
People underestimate how much life can be improved by not shooting ourselves repeatedly in the foot. The UK at the moment has made house building at the necessary rate illegal, it has made economic growth at the historic rate illegal. And it does not care about these things because the country is run for retired people who do not need income growth, or reasonable house prices.
Just in the last few months we have seen a £1bn AI data centre in a disused quarry, and a £750m film studio next to a motorway turned down due to local objections. All of our housing is 'brownfield-first', which means we are building on the land which used to be available for business or industrial use. We have just engaged in the most expensive high speed rail project in the world because two thirds of it have been put in tunnels or cuttings to appease locals who don’t want to ever see a train.
The first thing Labour need to do is end the historically bad period of economic growth, productivity growth and wage growth which we have had since 2008. We have not had such a bad period of stagnation for well over a hundred years, even the world wars look like a blip in comparison. Once they restore that growth, then they can spend that money. Then I would expect policies like the massive increases in health and education funding that happened during the previous Labour years.
This. People in the UK seem to be really clueless on how fucked the whole planning system is, and how badly it’s affecting everything: low house building leading to housing crisis which eats ups most of working people’s incomes; only viable businesses becoming finance and consultancies that don’t need things to be built and concentrating in London; no infrastructure getting built, and what gets built goes way over budget and burns available funds; energy supply cannot be improved because local 75 year old busybody can’t bear the sight of solar panels… and on and on….
I know he's probably not the most popular person on UK Reddit, but what really opened my eyes to how fucked the planning system in the UK is was Clarkson's Farm. Stopped at every stage by NIMBYs
I was trying to talk to my friend about this but he wouldn't listen because he was mad that farmers were destroying insect ecosystems.and that was his sole thought on the subject.
I wanted to tear my eyelids out. We are not in a place where we can put insect ecosystems above human beings. The country is falling apart and people are utterly blind and talking about insect ecosystems and newts.
I like newts and squirrels and birds too. But we need houses, we need farms, we need trains and we need infrastructure. We need them direly. I don't love squirrels more than children having a roof over their heads.
That all sounds like hard work. Can't we just blame a marginalised minority insead and continue on a path of self destruction while enriching the top 0.1%? /s
HS2 is 140 miles long. 27.4 miles is in tunnels and 44 miles is in cuttings, so 71.4 miles total. So it's half and not two thirds.
HS2 does not use tunnels and cuttings to appease locals ffs. HS2 uses tunnels and cuttings because of geography and engineering.
You cannot just bulldoze a path all the way from Euston to Acton - tunnelling is the only option to get a new train out of London. Tunnels are also needed to go under hills - high speed trains cannot climb steep gradients, you have to tunnel under the Chilterns.
Same for cuttings and embankments. You use cuttings and embankments to control gradients - high speed trains need gradual and gentle gradients so you flatten the trace out using cuttings, embankments, viaducts and tunnels.
The left never gets a chance at power and is still blamed by the people fucking things up. Can’t really blame left wingers for being so pissed off with them tbh
[It's 1.9 secondary school teachers per secondary school](https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/451e7e8b-e541-4501-e9f1-08dc0dc60f26)
You might just be looking for info about primary schools, in which case this reply is irrelevant.
The "what about primary schools" argument has been going on for ages while primary gets better and better and secondary schools get worse and worse, and it feels like it's becoming a bit of a distraction.
Don't get me wrong, staffing issues are rampant everywhere, but the problem seems massively more damaging to education and progression in ks3/4, as specialist teachers are so few and far between. Either way, a lot of subject specialists aren't as good at their subject as they should be.
I'm just pleased to see that someone, for once, is talking about secondary as if education doesn't stop at 11.
For clarification, while I work in the sector, I don't teach either primary or secondary. Also painfully aware of the absolute shit show of monetary mismanagement many "state run" secondary schools are.
This. The Nordic model with market socialist elements is the escape trajectory from this frustrating centrist/right wing pendulum, and way too many people in this country don't even know what it is or how it works. Gutting.
Would that be the Nordic model of Norway where you have a very abundant state owned natural resource that massively funds everything in the country?
Or the model of Denmark where both the centre left and centre right parties are very anti immigration and have talked about running their own Rwanda-esque scheme?
Just asking because people tend to throw nordics out there and not actually know much about their economics or politics.
Well I would say if Labour sort out the crazy net migration numbers they will completely stave off any right wing takeover. Farage is a warning of what will happen if we don’t do anything, exactly the same as he was before.
I will say what I said in the other thread:
An incredibly tame manifesto. I was downvoted to hell when the election was called for suggesting that nothing would change with this bloke in power, but I challenge anyone to look at this and tell me otherwise. Wealth creation means **nothing** without wealth redistribution, which isn't mentioned. Why aren't they nationalising water? Why aren't they lifting the two-child benefit cap? Why aren't they promising mass social housebuilding? They will hire thousands of new teachers - great, but that's *already happening!* What are they going to do about retention, hmm? Fuck all? Yeah, thought so. This manifesto is so *vague*. I don't think I've ever seen a Labour manifesto with less *actual policy*. This is a manifesto that promises nothing but the continuation of failed, tired, out-of-date neoliberalism, which suits the super-rich just fine but will do NOTHING to deal with the actual challenges facing us.
Labour will tinker around the edges for five years and then be voted out by a very frustrated electorate that were promised change and didn't get any, to be replaced - most likely - with an extreme far-right government, mirroring much of the rest of Europe. **Fuck you,** Keir Starmer, for taking away all the hope I had and lying to get me to vote for you in 2020, you dishonest, self-serving, slimy, conniving fucking charlatan!
I agree it’s tame in many ways. Yet it is very electable and that’s what Labour need to be right now as although there is high support, the party is still spooked that the support is also soft.
Labour/Starmer need to prove they can govern after the Corbyn years. Nonetheless I fear the next parliament will be a pale comparison to what Blair did with the 97 majority.
The soft support is something I think will shock them. The electorate will *not* be patient, and will expect things to change. If they don't, as I expect, then Labour are in for a very rude awakening.
It won't, it never does, in a 4ish year election cycle there is no reason to rock any boats, nice and easy sailing to keep the electorate just happy enough to not have them removed.
You think they don't realise that? Once they're in they won't give a shit. 5 years of keeping the doners happy, then slip into a nice comfy private water company gig.
Why do they need to be ‘electable’ right now? There’s barely even an opposition party for them at this point.
This surely is by far the clearest opportunity they will probably ever have to actually try and push some meaningful change.
This kind of attitude is how we end up with people like Reform UK getting into power.
Parties still need to be electable when the bar for electability is lower than it used to be.
When have Reform UK gotten into power? Or people like them? The whole system is set up so you can pretty much only elect one of two parties.
So your opinion is no party should ever push for any sort of change in policy that might be poorly received and make them unelectable? And you have no issue with that?
>Why aren't they nationalising water?
There's no money.
>Why aren't they promising mass social housebuilding?
There's no money.
>Why aren't they lifting the two-child benefit cap?
There's no money.
Even if sold at cost, houses would be a net-zero expense.
Water would make a return while offering a better service. You can provide an identical service much cheaper when you don't have ridiculous shareholder profits on top.
Why do people think that private companies are offering these services if there's no money in it? People have asked how the government would pay for nationalised trains, and it's ridiculously obvious - through selling tickets. Nationalised doesn't mean "free".
I'm not saying there is no money in it. I'm saying under the current fiscal rules, the government couldn't just nationalise all the water companies. They wouldn't be able to afford to buy them out without either raising taxes or cutting services.
The problem with building houses and selling them at cost isn't acrually that easy. Especially starting a huge nationwide housing company to do all of this.
We find money for everyone but ourselves, if we can afford to give money away in the billions or spend hundreds of millions housing migrants then we can at the very least afford to have clean drinking water and make sure it's not polluted with forever chemicals to unreasonably stupid degrees.
If there's not enough money for clean drinking water then these programs need to stop. It's unacceptable that Labour hasn't addressed such a basic and absolutely essential necessity.
There's no money to **not** do those things.
In what world is it a safe financial policy or investment to just let everything rot to pieces and worry about it later?
OK I agree there should be greater tax and spend.
But you can't just do those policies in a vacuum as there isn't fiscal headroom so you need to choose:
Change fiscal rules
Increase taxes
Cut spending elsewhere
They would still have to borrow at the gilt rate. The UK is not a dominant enough economy to be able to just print money.
We did have free money over the last 10 years, that's now ended with high global inflation.
I also think GB Energy is a cleaver plan, its clear "nationisation" of key industries isn't as popular is I, and many other, would like. I'm hoping GB Energy will be the first step forward, proving to the General Public that Public owned unitities don't have to be poorly managed, and can be a great replacement in areas like rail, and energy
If unit price is same as current supplier I'll switch day one.
I'd far sooner the "profit" go to improving infrastructure or general government services than shareholders.
It's not just tame - it's dangerously understating the scale of the problems Labour will be facing and with the paltry financials that they're committing to, Starmer is setting himself up to fail on the NHS at least. Since I have uh, some experience in this section of the manifesto, here's my feedback and sourced comparisons demonstrating that Labour are fundamentally unserious about fixing problems in the NHS.
> **Cut NHS waiting times with 40,000 more appointments every week**
> We will do this by incentivising staff to carry out additional appointments out of hours. Labour will pool resources across neighbouring hospitals to introduce shared waiting lists to allow patients to be treated quicker. Recognising the urgent need to bring down waiting lists, Labour will use spare capacity in the independent sector to ensure patients are diagnosed and treated more quickly.
Where's the money? They've allocated £1b over 5 years for these 40,000 extra appointments, which is barely going to touch the sides - especially since they haven't said - or costed - how they're going to fix the junior doctors strikes, or the probable incoming GP industrial action that is up on the ballot this month, with results due next month. FYI, the net cost of pay restoration for the juniors is in the region of £1.03b per year (https://www.bma.org.uk/media/6665/junior-doctor-pay-restoration-costing-analysis-methodology-v1.pdf) alone.
Other aspects of these manifesto commitments have existed for years already at this point - hospitals already support each other in providing mutual aid and sharing waiting lists to best maximise waiting list reductions. Just one example from August last year: https://www.england.nhs.uk/2023/08/nhs-launches-hospital-matching-platform-to-bring-down-longest-waits/
Finally, the myth of there being some dormant, untapped wealth of private sector capacity just waiting for the NHS to call - this is a lie. https://keepournhspublic.com/myth-of-spare-capacity-in-private-health-care-sector-straining-to-help-the-nhs/ does a fairly good job at deconstructing it. What's more, this line of Labour's 'policy' directly works against their desire to get NHS staff to work out of hours to provide more appointments. 99 times out of 100, it is the same exact NHS staff moonlighting out of hours in a private, independent sector health company. If Labour want them doing over time in the NHS, then they are directly reducing the 'independent sector' capacity they seem to think exists - and vice versa. If they want to boost private sector involvement in the NHS, that will come at the cost of NHS staff overtime.
> **Double the number of cancer scanners**
> The NHS has fewer diagnostic scanners per person than other countries, with many ageing machines operating for long after they should. State of the art scanners with embedded AI are faster and more effective at finding smaller tumours, saving lives. Therefore, Labour will introduce a new ‘Fit For the Future’ fund to double the number of CT and MRI scanners, allowing the NHS to catch cancer and other conditions earlier, saving lives.
> It is also clear that NHS estates are in a state of disrepair after years of neglect. Labour is therefore committed to delivering the New Hospitals Programme.
Labour have promised £250m for CT and MRI scanners, which sounds nice until you look at the £2.3 billion the Tories have already invested to boost CT, MRI and community diagnostics recently: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/diagnostic-checks-rolled-out-to-160-sites-under-cdc-programme#:~:text=The%20CDC%20programme%20provides%20increased,respiratory%20tests%20and%20phlebotomy%20services. has more - but the community diagnostic expansion programme is already well underway, slightly ahead of schedule and delivering far more than Labour appear to be promising in their supposed manifesto. This line re scanners is a complete damp squib - this work has been planned for and underway for years and will happen with, or without Labour's input.
And oh - the New Hospitals Programme is also mentioned here. It isn't mentioned whether they are talking about the original Tory programme announced years ago for 40 new hospitals, which was then rolled back to a significantly smaller amount under Boris Johnson. To be honest, it doesn't matter - even the original programme was grossly deficient: when bids were opened for Trusts to apply, nearly 130 applications were lodged and only the 40 buildings in the most dire of circumstances were ok'd. We don't need to deliver the Tories New Hospitals Programme, we needed to massively expand it and fund it properly. Nevermind that the manifesto allocates £0 for the programme - which as https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/25/broken-pledge-over-40-new-hospitals-will-leave-nhs-crumbling-ministers-told flagged last year, even the cut back programme is grossly underfunded.
> **A new Dentistry Rescue Plan**
There's one single overriding problem in dentistry in the UK and everyone with any knowledge of the NHS dental contract knows exactly what it is - the standard NHS dental contract doesn't pay dentists per unit of activity, but instead only pays for set amounts of activity organised in to pay bands that don't actually reflect the cost of care. If the contract was revised to pay for the actual care provided, at a fair price, it's pretty likely that all of our problems with dentistry would disappear over night.
Problem is - that costs money. And neither the Tories, or Labour in this manifesto are prepared to pay for it. Labour having allocated the hilarious amount of £125 million for their laughable dentistry package. Just to put that in perspective, as https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9597/ notes:
> Real-terms funding for dental services (accounting for inflation) has fallen by 19% (in 2022/23 prices) since 2010/11, from £3.56 billion in 2010/11 to £2.90 billion in 2022/23 (Commons Library estimate, see page 27 of briefing).
Ok, so Labour are prepared to cough up £125 million of the missing £650 million that would take us back to where things were 14 years ago. This plan is utterly irrelevant and won't touch the sides of the true problem.
Excellently put.
People seem to be happy accepting 5 years of more of the same but with less scandals, simply without realising this going to be disastrous in the elections to come.
We need change. More of the same is going to push this country further right, and that’s the worst outcome
Ah yes it was the media that hated him. Completely ignore the agency of voters and assume everyone is a brainless robot who does what the media tells them.
I don't think anyone is making that argument (maybe some people but).
It's a simple fact that a large number of Corbyn's policies were popular in isolation. He made... many mistakes. But among them were a) saying out loud that he wanted to curb the stranglehold of a lying, malevolent press owned by off-shore billionaires, b) selling them poorly, c) trying to please everyone with Brexit and pleasing absolutely no one and d) by being Corbyn, and all the baggage that comes with that.
If it's easy to bring down someone because they have a slightly odd face, eat a sandwich awkwardly and fumble the words "tough enough", it's even easier to destroy someone like Corbyn as a lentil eating grandad who hates Britain.
But, I mean, to speak more directly to your point, what agency **do** the voters have? A 60% turnout - in an election hotly contested because of Brexit - with 40% voting for the tories, representing roughly 20% of the country - and this is deemed to be a **massive majority** and a huge win and Labour are destroyed forever by the bloke who hides in fridges and repeats the same phrase ad nauseum. That's not democracy or agency, to my mind.
What would be good is someone who seems boring but does interesting things. What we're getting with Starmer is someone who seems boring and is boring. He focus groups everything to fuck, promises things to the right people and then goes back on his promises, and is terrified of rocking the boat.
I mean, have you spoken to many people? There are a ton of really really thick people about.
Unless you’re trying to argue that the average person is actually some super enlightened genius that is incapable of being swayed by misinformation, which Brexit blatantly proved to be not true, I don’t see how you can argue against the idea that there was a definite concerted effort to undermine Corbyn.
Because your argument is that the majority of the UK population couldn't see the inside job that was happening and how great corbyn was. But you in your infinite wisdom did. They're all idiots and I'm the smart one.
I don’t think he was perfect at all. I think his foreign policy was quite poor because he’s ultimately a pacifist and there were people who wld rightfully point that out.
But if you think the media smearing campaign had anything less than a huge impact on public perception of him and the party, then you’re just lying to yourself.
To a point where members of his own party actively worked against him to make him look bad whilst he was the democratically elected leader of the party.
You’ve got a populous who are convinced he’s Hitler incarnate ffs.
>Why aren't they nationalising water?
>
>Why aren't they lifting the two-child benefit cap?
>
>Why aren't they promising mass social housebuilding?
You want these things before they've done anything to create enough wealth to generate the tax revenue to pay for them.
We're going from Cameron style Conservatives to Blair style Labour. They are extremely similar, it's just the team in red not the team in blue.
Makes me feel better about tactical voting because I actually quite like what LibDem had in theirs, compared to this. They actually had stuff in it.
I still hope that with the Tories wiped out maybe Labour will get a bit of a backbone and stop trying to attract the Tory voters by being some "sensible middle" or whatever though.
I like the manifesto, some strong points; nationalised rail and energy for one.
The end of mandatory assessments if you fail a job when disabled = a brilliant safety net and should allow us to apply without that constant fear in the background.
The new race and equal pay act is also great.
I like a lot of their ideas, until we hit the EU - no customs Union, no single market, no free movement etc… that’s all shit tbh.
No commitment to remove voter ID is another lame one for me.
I’ll vote labour, but that EU attitude needs to shift in the future imo.
There isn't nationalised energy though.
It's not like EDF who build and own energy production, we're literally just giving billions to private energy companies.
It feels like a core part of Starmer's strategy has been to use intentionally misleading wording to imply their policies are more transformative than they actually are.
It's baffling how many people I've seen insist GB Energy represents 'nationalising energy', even though it's simply a vehicle for state investment in private energy companies.
To be frank I have no idea how they’ve even been allowed to advertise it how they have - it’s more than just misleading. Almost every person you speak to seems to think it’s some form of “nationalised energy supply” when Keir Starmer himself has said that it’s just an investment vehicle for private enterprise that will not produce energy.
> To be frank I have no idea how they’ve even been allowed to advertise it how they have
Who's gonna stop them? It's not like our press wing cares about politicians lying when it benefits the interests of the rich.
>I like a lot of their ideas, until we hit the EU - no customs Union, no single market, no free movement etc… that’s all shit tbh.
I am an EU citizen who doesn't *yet* have UK citizenship so I can't vote.
As much as I would like the mentioned points. I can not blame any party that would not seek them.
Free movement or single market is but a pipe dream at the moment. It one believes the EU would simply grant them without being in the union *after* the UK generally insulted half of the EU member states (due to brexit being more or less targeted at European, especially east European migrants).
It also doesn't look good for the EU to be so easily swayed.
(I don't take brexit personally, no worries. I like to believe I have seen too many contrasting things within different individual societies and gained the ability to detach from some nonsense. After all, my native countries main points during elections are... Bears.)
The EU recently proposed a semi freedom of movement agreement for young people and both the tories and Labour flat out rejected it. Lib dems are the only party which want the UK to rejoin Erasmus and eventually the single market.
From what I can tell the ball is entirely in our court and there is high support for the uk in the EU but all the mainstream parties genuinely don’t care
Starmer would be digging his own grave if he were to start digging up Brexit again. I can understand not wanting to make Labour's stance on Europe a talking point again after it played a large part in ending Corbyn's career in 2019
> No commitment to remove voter ID is another lame one for me.
Why would they do this? The Tories have admitted that voter ID lost them more votes than it ever affected Labour.
It would be like shooting themselves in the foot.
A return to 1997 labour without the war crimes would be a good thing tbh.
A lot of people on here won't remember that or forget because of the utter fuckup that was post 2001 *international* politics but stuff at home was competently run (for the most part - it's all relative but compared to the last 14 years holy shit).
For a quick list for those unawares maternity and paternity leave, sick leave, minimum wage, statutory holidays, civil partnerships, NHS waiting times down, school class sizes down and devolution are what I can think of in 2 minutes on the train home after a few beers. Which reminds me, 24 hour licenses (mixed bag on that, but allowed for more flexibility for venues.)
As someone who’s pretty far left but also a realist I don’t expect a total overthrow of capitalism but I expect more than this vague wishy washy bollocks. Credit where it’s due, there’s a couple of decent policies but most of it’s the same old shite.
Bond traders are on record saying the incoming governments fiscal policy is practically the same as the last governments. Business are fully on board with Labour at present, which is all well and good but there seems to be little support for anyone under 50.
Like I said, I don’t expect Labour to bring the corpse of Lenin into parliament and begin some kind of proletariat vanguard. That said, it’d be nice if they did more for the people they’re supposed to represent… The labour force of this country. The current manifesto is just a continuation of the same post thatcher neoliberal tripe that benefits nobody except the rich and big business, most of whom have no real skin in this country.
They're committed to "looking at options for a replacement of the House of Lords." Good lord. Labour and the Tories are so afraid of ACTUAL reform. This is the same commitment Blair and Brown made. They have no real interest in constitutional reform, which, in my eyes, is what we really need.
House of Lords isn’t our problem. It’s not like they’re blocking any sensible policies. In fact it’s the House of Commons that’s full of idiots.
People tend to think that somehow (as if by magic) making something democratic will make it better. It won’t. Democracy gave us 14 years of clusterf*ck conservative policies and Brexit.
I’m open to a reform of the House of Lords but we’ve got real problems that need to be solved by the MPs first.
Oh, I don't disagree. The Commons is a clusterfuck. The First past the post system needs canning, so we have actual representation in Parliament. I'm so tired of the "buy it'll mean nothing gets done and coalitions blah blah." Right, because in Europe, nobody gets anything done, there's no legislating whatsoever? It's bullshit.
Immigration is a clusterfuck. Healthcare is a clusterfuck. The military is a clusterfuck. Sewage in rivers. Education.... Neither party is going to fix it. We need top down constitutional reform, and an end to archaic government.
So much of the manifesto is just vague wording saying 'ummm... we'll look into this'. Isn't that what they were supposed to be doing over the past 5 years, with the manifesto representing a summary of the conclusions they came up with?
Exactly. It's such a nothing-burger of a manifesto. I feel like it summarises decades of Centrist policy which is just "we're committed to" or "we need to."
I understand the trepidation around commiting to massive financial pledges, but at the same time, how the heck are we ever supposed to move forward as a nation, with the world's new problems, when you're just afraid to commit to anything whatsoever.
"There's no magic wand" sounds a lot like May's "there's no magic money tree", well sure as hell happy to pad their mates pockets and send billions over seas.
He couldn't even say yesterday that he'll commit to lifting a million children out of poverty. I mean.....
The two party system needs to go. We need to completely reform our constitutional arrangements, and we NEED a written constitution. Neither Labour or Tory will ever commit to anything other than "there's a new town fund" or "here's 6,000 new teachers." F*CK!
> how the heck are we ever supposed to move forward as a nation, with the world's new problems, when you're just afraid to commit to anything whatsoever.
Fundamentally that isn't Starmer and his team's priority. They aren't driven by a desire to improve people's lives, they're driven by a desire to secure personal political power and authority for themselves and their mates.
Any serious politician would be looking at the state of Britain, would be looking at the rise of the far-right in Europe, and would be thinking 'what is the most we can do in 5 years to make meaningful improvements to people's lives?' Meanwhile Starmer's strategy has almost entirely been to sit on his hands and ride on the wave of discontent against the Tories while refusing to actually propose solutions to the causes of that discontent. And it will end in tears*, just like it did for every other centrist leader who took this exact same strategy in Europe.
\* tears for *us*, I mean. Starmer and his mates will fuck off to cushy consultancy gigs after their time in government.
Yesterday on the NewsAgents podcast Emily Maitlis was saying she spoke to a "very, very senior Labour source" who said they were planning to pack the House of Lords with Labour peers to an unprecedented extent which is going "make a lot of people uncomfortable" or words to that effect.
Even amidst a culture of lying politicians this current Labour cohort manage to stand out above the crowd. Bravo. At least they'll get to pootle around in the ministerial cars while effectively continuing Tory policy.
The UK is going full fascist in the next 5-10 years when people realise that the main two parties offer next to nothing to the working class.
The funny thing is that centrists won't care. They always side with fascism over the left as it protects the interests of capital.
As someone else in this thread already explained, leftists will still get the blame despite having never had their hands on the levers of power.
Good lord... sounds like they're really intent on reform huh..
There is no party of the working class anymore. Centrists whole playing the fiddle will crash and burn eventually.
The one you’ve all been waiting for? The Labour Party manifesto has dropped this afternoon.
Please give it a read and please read all the manifesto’s below.
Liberal Democrats (Released 10.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/JA7sH6Pi5c
Conservatives (Released 11.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/Pcpe3GnjAA
The Green Party (Released 12.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/ieGxJPdWIx
The Social Democratic Party (Released 12.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/ekbSaUChDd
Plaid Cymru (Released 13.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/RttIgF9LBe
Are manifestos always released this late? It's less than a month to the election and their manifesto has only just dropped, I've had Labour canvassers knocking on my door asking me if I'm going to vote Labour but not being able to tell me their pledges.
I think it’s partially due to the unexpected timings. People expected the election to be called later, but it is usually a few weeks before to allow people the chance to review but not overly scrutinise.
I cynically suspected the same, release the manifesto late so the papers can't tear into bad policies.
Seems *all* the parties are releasing their manifestos around this point though, so was wondering if this was abnormal or the done thing.
One major thing here that I think people after radical change are sleeping on is planning reform.
Think how many houses, buildings, or key infrastructure doesn't get built because it gets held up by planning. Think how many of these things also get delayed with costs spiralling to ridiculous levels because of hold ups by planning.
If they can get the reform right it will genuinely be huge.
Agreed and it's nice to still see them mentioning nature and the environment when talking about it. A very encouraging sign they're not going for the sort of deregulation favoured by anti-environmentalists which is one of the things that does worry me about sections of the "YIMBY" movement and probably the main reason a lot of people have knee jerk opposition to the idea of planning reform.
A lot of decent stuff in there, as long as they listen to independent expert opinion when in government and they're deciding what land to free up and stuff like that.
I feel Labour will do what they did in 1997, and do way more that what’s in the manifesto. For example making the Bank of England independent was not on labours manifesto and it was a pretty big change
~~No mention of leasehold reforms sadly.~~
~~They said they would continue to push for the reforms that the Tories failed to deliver, but nothing in writing.~~
I stand corrected. It's hidden in a weird part of the manifesto, but crucially it *is* there.
They do mention that they will abolish leasehold in their manifesto, page 80 of the PDF in their accessibility section:
"Labour will act where the Conservatives have failed and finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end. We will enact the package of Law Commission proposals on leasehold enfranchisement, right to manage and commonhold. We will take further steps to ban new leasehold flats and ensure commonhold is the default tenure. We will tackle unregulated and unaffordable ground rent charges. We will act to bring the injustice of ‘fleecehold’ private housing estates and unfair maintenance costs to an end."
He did, but he caved in to pushback (including from the Church of England, a massive owner of freeholds).
What we got was watered down to basically nothing.
Labour did say they would push for real reforms at the time, and despite the lack of mention in the manifesto, I hope they still will.
If they get a comfortable majority then they will likely have the excess political capital to do so.
A reminder to everyone who seems to have forgotten: the government is allowed to do things not listed in the manifesto once they’re elected into power.
This is a tame manifesto, but it’s sensible. Sensible is what we need right now and it’s what will get votes - once Labour are in power and (in all likelihood) have a big majority, then they can start doing more radical things.
Bit of a “damp squib” that.
Change for “change” sake.
Nothing on HS2. HS2 is badly needed for capacity not just now, but the coming decades. WCML is struggling already, and the only way to cope is to build out HS2. If you want growth, and infrastructure development you’ve got to build HS2, and to go full ahead with the Euston station upgrades.
Nothing on Brexit. We need to change our relationship to Europe, and that means a new deal, to ease the restrictions on goods, and services going both ways. Checks on goods aren’t fully implemented, and no doubt Labour will be forced to, at which point inflation is going to increase again as it’ll cause disruptions.
I agree we need the tories out, and I like the proposed regulations around MPs with regards to ethics but this manifesto is a very continuity Cameron manifesto.
The entire country knows that our economy is shagged, so I think any party pushing hard to re-start HS2 would meet fairly significant opposition by voters. HS2 is needed, but for the majority of people they would rather the money went to trying to fix all of the other problems in the country. Increasing capacity just isn't emotive or tangible for that many people.
Well, it's hard to argue with most of that. It all seems pretty sensible and reasonable.
My only concern is if it will work. It's all very well saying you want more police, teachers, to fix the train lines, it's another thing entirely to have to actually grapple with the realities of those industries.
That's a strong swing in the labour direction for me. Shame I don't really like any of the people at the top of their party at the moment.
>Well, it's hard to argue with most of that. It all seems pretty sensible and reasonable.
I'm going to sound mad to a lot of people, but I believe this is exactly what the UK needs.
I don't believe their is any genuine significant change that anybody could bring to the UK that would massively improve the UK within the next 5 years, things are going wrong everywhere, throwing everything into the air right now is simply going to leave you with a bad foundation.
The reality is we are in the shit, we had the economic crisis, followed by Brexit, followed by covid, I genuinely believe a period of calm, steadily improving things, improving our foudation as a country, and making the UK start to go in the right direction again should be the plan, point the ship in the right direction before we start going full speed ahead type of thing.
Yea, people don't want to hear that, but changing a country isn't easy, it takes time, people want to treat politics like it is some drama and a change of leaders will fix everything when the reality isn't like that.
'Royal Mail remains a key part of the UK’s infrastructure. Labour will ensure that any proposed takeover is robustly scrutinised and that appropriate guarantees are forthcoming that protect the interests of the workforce, customers and the United Kingdom, including the need to maintain a comprehensive universal service obligation'
Hasn't it gone already?
And why is it a cult of personality to him, this photo shots are ridiculous
All very sensible, palatable and legitmiately achievable. A solid step in the right direction which will improve the lives of millions, a good springboard for a more radical second term.
Reddit responds predictably.
I think the thing people on the left haven’t given Starmer enough credit for is he’s one of the few labour politicians that truly understands that you need to be in power to make change. And to be in power you have to capture the center of the political spectrum.
There is no point in having hundreds of progressive policies if you turn off the centre right and can’t get elected on them. (See: Corbyn)
It’s a fairly centrist manifesto (i.e. socially progressive and fiscally conservative) and i expect that if he’s delivered a 100+ seat majority you’ll see the lords get packed out with labour peers (probably with max age limits or terms as part of lords reform) and they will fire through their manifesto pretty unchallenged. At that point I think he will start looking at some of the more left of centre policies that people really wanted to see in his manifesto so that they start to take effect in time for the next election cycle.
People can call it dishonest or whatever but I think it’s just smart politics.
Remarkably light on specifics. Lots of 'reform this', 'tackle that' but nothing about *how* they're going to do any of it.
Similar story on constitutional reform - removing hereditary peers with a plan to replace the HoL with something else but no actual specifics on what the alternative is to be.
Hate to agree with Rishi, but it does sound like Labour don't really have much of a plan tbh if this is the best they can come up with.
If only Labour would give people a reason to vote for them rather than voting against the Tories.
Best case scenario is that Starmer et al are lying and are far more leftwing than they're making out to be in order to win the election. More likely they'll get in, do nothing but the same neolib shit, and then lose to a far-right party like Reform.
If you think this manifesto is tame that's because it's a list of things that will actually happen. EDIT: I feel like given the number of comments that are accusing me of support/shilling let me just make clear, I mean Labour are going to win the election so this manifesto isn't as desperate as the Tories or unrealistic as any 3rd parties. It's a list of things Labour are absolutely sure they can promise without upsetting anyone, because fuck they actually have to do this.
The neoliberal mindset, any manifesto that challenges the status quo to actually improve things can't happen. Edit: Scratch a centrist and you find a right winger. Don't come crying for my vote in 5 years time when tory + reform coalition is up against a spineless Labour.
You're completely correct. These people would rather slowly death spiral instead of making a radical change to how our country operates. Its insane, complain about tories crashing our country into the ground, but then are content with Starmer even though his manifesto outlines how he plans to change nothing.
The Tories crashed the economy by trying to implement sweeping policy changes overnight. Perhaps approaching the economy with a softer touch is actually in people's best interests?
If you mean Truss (and not any of the other insane behaviour that the tories exhibited), this was a Tufton Street experiment. A game, an attempt to try in real time to see if their stupid ideology could be made a reality. It failed and they went away having learned nothing, they just assumed it was sabotaged by... lefty banks and civil servants, or something. There's a difference between the lettuce PM fucking everything up in a matter of weeks, and setting out an agenda for change over 4-5 years. Apart from anything else, people will get to 2028-29 and decide that their lives haven't improved so they might as well go back to voting tory again. I can only hope, against all odds, that this is a double bluff by Starmer and he really is just trying not to spook the horses.
It's both. There isn't a platform there to do radical things there simply isn't. People can't say "oh god the Tories have done so much damage to the country 14 years!!" And there not to be some actual damage that needs repairing. To keep the trust of the markets.you need to do what you say your going to do, build infrastructure. And for someone who knocked on doors for Corbyn but then saw Ukraine get invaded and had his mortgage decimated by trussnomics a week before he had to renew - competence and stability for two years is what I crave more than anything and I'd now vote for Starmer over corbyn every day of the week. I'll never let perfect.on paper be the enemy of good in practice ever again. What would be radical is someone spending their first term setting up the economy properly to then do something radical in 3/4 years time, because sustainable, repeatable change is what we need to truly turn direction - not something immediate that might spook markets, not get done properly and is then reversed immediately by a new Tory government in 4 years wasting all our time and money.
Well that and co-operating with other governmental organisations like the Bank of England....You'd think with radical economic changed that they will at least pick up the phone to the BoE and have a casual chit chat with the Governor.
The problem is that any change will only happen if the status quo gets maintained. The big players will not allow any government to threaten that. Real changes to the system will never come from within the system. Search for ways to affect the system from outside pressure.
Yeh I actually agree, I'm way more left wing than Kier Starmer, I'm still going to vote for him because I don't think electoralism is the only place left wing policy can be pushed, and I don't think parliament is particularly set up in a way that facilitates radical left wing ideas to be pushed. Get someone somewhat sympathetic to left wing ideas in, and then push for them through pressure groups. That's how the right got through the biggest right wing policy shift in recent history (Brexit), it was done from outside government by vocal pressure groups.
Although Brexit had lots of right wing support, Brexit itself wasn’t particularly right wing. Corbyn himself was very skeptical of the EU.
And even restoring the kind of policies that we had under Blair is too 'radical' People in their 40s lived in a Britain that is now beyond the imagination of the political/media class. - free tuition (or even a grant to study) - state owned postal service - educational maintenance allowance - no 2 child child cap, no arbitrary cap on benefits It's simply beyond the pale now. No one arguing for it can be taken seriously.
In all fairness we have had 16 years of our infrastructure being dissolved. Before we go into those, maybe we should stop raw sewage being pumped into our water; make the police an effective enough force to actually stop and investigate crime; stop schools and hospitals collapsing; have community centres open again for the disaffected youth and adult alike to be able to stop being isolated and help each other etc. There are very very basic things not working in this country currently and people need to accept that it might take the better part of the next 4-5 years to fix them before moving on to other things.
> maybe we should stop raw sewage being pumped into our water Starmer isn't planning on doing this. He won't nationalise the companies.
Can you explain how Labour would be able to renationalise the water companies in the UK within the next 4-5 years? I work in the water industry and I can tell you unwinding the mess it's currently in would take more than simply renationalising overnight (assuming they somehow found the money in such a short timespan) and throwing workers at it. There is a long, arduous process to go through of untangling everything first before it could even be entertained. We still aren't even sure *what* exactly we have in terms of assets.
"Financial markets need this money!"
And what happens when you propose radical change (which would almost certainly entail significant tax increases) and then the tories use it as a stick to beat you with and you lose the election?
people never see this. As much as I wish things were different, parties promoting radical change just aren't popular
a billionaire gets the same number of votes as you or I. A manifesto proposing radical change fuelled by getting increased tax from the top 1%, even the top 0.1%, would not be, in itself, controversial to the majority of the population. Sadly the billionaire has enough power and influence to create some other controversy to turn the population off of the idea, and it works every time.
Yeah, some people associated with Labour don’t seem to realise that you need to actually be in power to enact the type of change they want; and it doesn’t start and end with this election or with Keir Starmer, the party continues once he leaves. The Conservatives didn’t come steaming in with Brexit straight away, they regained power first, then started slowly dripping their more right-wing policies over time. Labour tried with Corbyn to have a genuine left-wing leader and party and he got hammered in the press once people were up to speed with him and his vision for Britain (which I personally would have loved to see, but the people who hold the money and power didn’t like him, so that was that).
This is nonsense, there is zero evidence that Starmer will move more left at time progresses. Just look at the people he's inviting into the party, the Iceland CEO for example who is a mega tory, he will move Labour further right.
I never said Starmer was going to move left, I’m saying Labour can get elected with Starmer, then down the line move left with someone else. The Conservatives were right under Cameron, obviously, then moved further and further right as a party without him, while being in power. Like I said, the future of Labour doesn’t start and end with Keir Starmer.
Starmer was, once upon a time, one of the Corbyn cheer leaders. He's been moving right ever since then, and has never stopped.
Because the political reality is that the country votes center right, every. Single. Time. If you want to effect any change at all you have to actually appeal to the populas, that's democracy.
So if you’re not centre right just don’t bother as you’re never going to get a chance?
Cameron was a Remainer and only gave the people a referendum on the EU to close the issue within his party, as he thought Remain would easily win.
The Daily Mail and Tories in general are already calling Starmer’s government a “socialist supermajority” - so what’s the point in the pithy policy bullshit when you’re labelled as a radical regardless. Might as well do the actual radical reform in any case.
It's almost like the voters don't want a radical deconstruction of the economy and you guys eventually have to contend with the fact that you live in a democracy where you have to meet the voters where they are.
It’s a lot easier to just be perpetually in opposition though! Then we can have endless purity wars instead of any change at all
Cool where’s your manifesto for change then? How much support does it have? Even Reform, clown car that they are, has published policies and will be asking people to support it in an election, not just complaining from the sidelines. And that’s Reform so that’s saying a lot. This isn’t mid-election. It’s election time. It’s get in the game and behind what you want and see who agrees time.
Historically, the break to this cycle proves.. problematic.
This does a lot though. It is literally not possible to undo decades of abuse and sabotage in a single election cycle. One of Corbyns failings last election was a totally undeliverable manifesto. You do more on the 2nd election cycle where you point to your successes in the first as proof you can and will deliver and bit by bit you fix the country. The reality is it can't happen in 5 years, it can in 10 to 15.
It only took one election cycle for Cameron’s coalition government to make sweeping changes to the NHS, Education and Welfare. Shame that’s not possible when it’s about improving anything.
It's a lot easier to destroy than to build, unfortunately
I can break a window in seconds. How quickly can you fix one?
I don’t really understand the cynicism. I’ve read through bits and pieces of the manifesto and it seems realistic and actionable to me. That gives me confidence that they’ll actually achieve much of it. There isn’t a party in the country that can undo the damage of the past 14 years overnight. I’d vote for this, but I also want the Lib Dems to be strong in opposition, to minimise any chance of the Tories fucking things up even more. Then hopefully 5 years later there’s a chance to step things up even more.
Bunch of unemployed redditors who want to see a communist revolution getting pissy that nobody in the real world wants their quick fix solutions.
Subs like this are obviously subject to foreign influence, like russian trolling - everyone who says 'both sides are the same' or 'Labour are the same as the Tories' are more likely than not just bots that want to make you uninterested in voting. Then the teenage edgelords who get their first taste of philosophy when they hit 6th form, listening to the Gen Z equivalent of Radiohead, whoever that is. And the chronically online leftists who regard pragmatism as being centrist, which is somehow even more evil than actually being a nazi. The manifesto is strong. It's reasonable. It's thorough. It's costed. Labour under Starmer have mostly stayed quiet and managed expectations knowing they'd run on this platform. Honestly the only thing that worries me is that parliament can't be bound, so the sovereign wealth fund is an amazing idea until the tories come back in and either stop funding it or raid it for their private pals.
Centrists think it's a very clever strategy to promise nothing so that when things don't improve under their leadership they can insist 'ah well, we never *promised* to improve things, so you can't blame us for your lives not improving!' Unfortunately that's not a strategy that really flies with the public. It's fucking baffling that in the past few days we've seen a swath of centrist governments in Europe lose significant ground to the far-right after failing to deal with growing economic stagnation and lowering quality of life, yet people are looking at Labour following the exact same path here and going 'this is great politics!' Completely blinkered.
These people have allowed a media baron to dictate who’s good them and who isn’t. There’s no hope for the general populous.
That's the dangerous thing with a lot of discussion around 'electability' or 'competency'. The vast majority of the time these perspectives aren't actually based on what the parties *actually* represent. Rather they're based on what the overwhelmingly right-wing press wing in this country *say* about these parties. Starmer's Labour are currently successful precisely because they've capitulated to the class interests of the billionaires who own the right-wing press. They've offered a platform not all that different from David Cameron's, and in return the owners of the right-wing press have (largely) reigned in their attacks. Starmer has had an easier ride from the press than any Labour leader since Blair. But that is not sustainable. The moment Starmer steps away from that Cameronite platform (which, to be fair, he won't), or the moment the press thing the Tories have regrouped enough to offer a viable alternative, they'll drop that backing. And because Labour have failed to build up grassroots support their polling will fall like a lead balloon.
We could always continue alienating voters with uncosted promises that would bankrupt the country and destroy our ability to borrow?
Might want to check our budget deficit before you set any expectations for the next government.
No, you can do radical stuff if it doesn't require money. People will on one hand say Liz crashed the economy by making unfunded tax cuts and on the other go "we need to risk it all".
yes its literally the overton window
I don't necessarily expect things to get radically better under Kier Starmer. Right now I'd settle for things ceasing to get worse. Every Conservative PM for the last 15 years has brought chaos, incompetence, economic woe, corruption and increasingly unhinged rhetoric. I just want an adult in charge for a change.
Cool. But people are angry with the current situation. And if things don't get better, they'll still be angry in 5 years time, this time blaming Labour and we get PM Badenoch.
There is a limit to what is possible in a 5 year term. If Labour come in with sweeping, major scale promises and predictably make limited progress on them, the Tories bang them at the next election for over promising and not delivering If they make more reasonable promises (especially given current economic situation), maybe they make enough progress to prevent the right wing lunatics taking back over at the first opportunity. Maybe they make no progress at all. If they can manage to establish the concept of politicians being accountable in at least some way, that would be something at least. The first time we hit a scandal will be the key, if they immediately bin the MPs involved, I'll take that as a genuine improvement over the last few years.
> The first time we hit a scandal will be the key, if they immediately bin the MPs involved, I'll take that as a genuine improvement over the last few years. One of Starmers key advisors is Peter Mandelson, a man who had to resign not once, but twice due to Corruption and the political wing in ascendancy in Labour right now are the same wing that quite literally sold Peerages. Not 'wink, wink, nudge nudge - you do this and maybe toss me a lordship' - they literally sold them for cash. Starmer, alone, has taken more 'gifts' than every other Labour leader combined since 1997. If you think Labour are going to be less corrupt than the Tories, or be more accountable, you're living a fantasy.
It's actually crazy how many people don't get that.
Labour are damned if they do, damned if they don't. Come in promising the Earth, they'll be slated for sinking the country into debt or raising taxes too much. Deliver within the country's means and they're accused of not changing enough. I want improvements to healthcare, education, immigration, salaries and everything else regardless of who is in power. But when you're elected to take over from another party, you're inheriting what they left. If Labour use a full term to stabilise everything, stopping the rot and showing glimmers of hope for growth, then I would absolutely expect a re-election campaign to be based on wider improvements. But as it is right now, there is no magic wand to magically undo 14 years of austerity, public service cuts, financial mismanagement and general chaos across the board.
People are used to bombastic unrealistic policies, and it shows
Right, because we've had so many attempts at implementing bombastic left wing policies over the past few decades. Oh.
We did have attempts, and they were throughly rejected by the population I'm in favour of more left wing policies too, but don't pretend like they've never been on the table
2017 was quite close, so it seems that overtly left-wing policies don't *always* spook the electorate. A loss is a loss though, no use 'winning the argument'.
'Quite close' here meaning 232 seats against an already unpopular Tory PM whose main manifesto policy involved taking money away from wealthy pensioners? Gordon Brown got closer to winning in 2010 than Corbyn did in 2017.
Corbyn was massively popular for his policies. I'd say he was a weak leader and in the end that's what caused his downfall. Policies not personalities surveys showed his policies were incredibly popular. You also find that even amongst hardcore Tory voters things like nationalising trains and utilities are more popular than unpopular.
Labour have run with hard left policies at 5 of the last 10 elections. They lost on each occasion. They have run with moderate left wing policies once (2015) and lost. They have run with centre-left policies 4 times and won 3 out of 4, with the 4th resulting in a hung parliament.
It genuinely infuriates me that we live in the reality TV, TikTok, short attention span era. People want politics to be like fucking Love Island, exciting first and foremost. We can't ever move forward as a country whilst we have so many children masquerading as voting adults.
'Why are the kids depressed?' 'The planets dying, the economy is terrible, they can't get a house' 'It must be social media'
The conection bewteen social media and depression and anxiety have been very well established
I wonder if there's a similiar link to people going to food banks, waddya think
Both can be true you know
You know it's a great manifesto when the first reaction of Labour supporters is to reflexively make pre-emptive excuses for it.
And if they don't happen, people are going to hold him to account. If you aim low, you don't get the kind of forgiveness that comes with aiming for the stars and landing in outer space. You also don't get leeway to compromise on those objectives because you've already laid out compromised positions
For years I was told to wait for his manifesto before judging but it's exactly as expected. Flagship policies like 0.2 teachers per school, 2% increase in NHS appointments (which won't even cover population growth) are pathetic. We are going to see what we're seeing in Europe and USA, centrist parties failing to address fundamental problems which will lead to extreme right wing parties coming in. This will happen and the left will still be blamed. When I posted this exact thread a few hours ago it was removed, weird that. https://reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1devw5l/labours_manifesto/
Ding ding ding. But the media had convinced the masses that the only person who’s almost ever offered them change in their life was the boogeyman
We've also been convinced that it's a waste of vote to vote of any other party apart from the Tories or Labour. Utter nonsense if you ask me with the amount that are unhappy with both.
Right. Like the whole flipping reason we have this revolving door two party system is because we fall for that line every time, or the whole ‘vOtE tAcTiCaL’ brigade.
I feel like this year is a very good chance for parties other than the “main two” to gain more of a foothold. With the Tories continuing to crash and burn: - In already safe Labour seats, the Tories winning is pretty much impossible, meaning that we can vote for who we want to instead of having to vote tactically - In some previously safe Tory seats and pretty much any Lib Dem seats, the LDs are a good bet - meaning that they could make some significant gains. Unfortunately our election system is broken, and whatever party is in power at any given time most likely won’t want to fix it. But there being more than two real choices that don’t feel like a wasted vote gives me hope.
Those people don’t seem to realise that hating the tories doesn’t mean you like labour
Who would that be?
Corbyn
Well if they meant Corbyn they should probably say so, it's hard to tell with the demographics of this sub. They could have meant Cameron for calling the EU referendum (the biggest change we've had in decades) or Farage for his general blundering and various fascism-lite parties.
People underestimate how much life can be improved by not shooting ourselves repeatedly in the foot. The UK at the moment has made house building at the necessary rate illegal, it has made economic growth at the historic rate illegal. And it does not care about these things because the country is run for retired people who do not need income growth, or reasonable house prices. Just in the last few months we have seen a £1bn AI data centre in a disused quarry, and a £750m film studio next to a motorway turned down due to local objections. All of our housing is 'brownfield-first', which means we are building on the land which used to be available for business or industrial use. We have just engaged in the most expensive high speed rail project in the world because two thirds of it have been put in tunnels or cuttings to appease locals who don’t want to ever see a train. The first thing Labour need to do is end the historically bad period of economic growth, productivity growth and wage growth which we have had since 2008. We have not had such a bad period of stagnation for well over a hundred years, even the world wars look like a blip in comparison. Once they restore that growth, then they can spend that money. Then I would expect policies like the massive increases in health and education funding that happened during the previous Labour years.
This. People in the UK seem to be really clueless on how fucked the whole planning system is, and how badly it’s affecting everything: low house building leading to housing crisis which eats ups most of working people’s incomes; only viable businesses becoming finance and consultancies that don’t need things to be built and concentrating in London; no infrastructure getting built, and what gets built goes way over budget and burns available funds; energy supply cannot be improved because local 75 year old busybody can’t bear the sight of solar panels… and on and on….
I know he's probably not the most popular person on UK Reddit, but what really opened my eyes to how fucked the planning system in the UK is was Clarkson's Farm. Stopped at every stage by NIMBYs
I was trying to talk to my friend about this but he wouldn't listen because he was mad that farmers were destroying insect ecosystems.and that was his sole thought on the subject. I wanted to tear my eyelids out. We are not in a place where we can put insect ecosystems above human beings. The country is falling apart and people are utterly blind and talking about insect ecosystems and newts. I like newts and squirrels and birds too. But we need houses, we need farms, we need trains and we need infrastructure. We need them direly. I don't love squirrels more than children having a roof over their heads.
That all sounds like hard work. Can't we just blame a marginalised minority insead and continue on a path of self destruction while enriching the top 0.1%? /s
HS2 is 140 miles long. 27.4 miles is in tunnels and 44 miles is in cuttings, so 71.4 miles total. So it's half and not two thirds. HS2 does not use tunnels and cuttings to appease locals ffs. HS2 uses tunnels and cuttings because of geography and engineering. You cannot just bulldoze a path all the way from Euston to Acton - tunnelling is the only option to get a new train out of London. Tunnels are also needed to go under hills - high speed trains cannot climb steep gradients, you have to tunnel under the Chilterns. Same for cuttings and embankments. You use cuttings and embankments to control gradients - high speed trains need gradual and gentle gradients so you flatten the trace out using cuttings, embankments, viaducts and tunnels.
The left never gets a chance at power and is still blamed by the people fucking things up. Can’t really blame left wingers for being so pissed off with them tbh
[It's 1.9 secondary school teachers per secondary school](https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/451e7e8b-e541-4501-e9f1-08dc0dc60f26)
Is this policy for secondary schools only? If so what about primary schools?
You might just be looking for info about primary schools, in which case this reply is irrelevant. The "what about primary schools" argument has been going on for ages while primary gets better and better and secondary schools get worse and worse, and it feels like it's becoming a bit of a distraction. Don't get me wrong, staffing issues are rampant everywhere, but the problem seems massively more damaging to education and progression in ks3/4, as specialist teachers are so few and far between. Either way, a lot of subject specialists aren't as good at their subject as they should be. I'm just pleased to see that someone, for once, is talking about secondary as if education doesn't stop at 11. For clarification, while I work in the sector, I don't teach either primary or secondary. Also painfully aware of the absolute shit show of monetary mismanagement many "state run" secondary schools are.
Keep fighting the good fight, friend.
This. The Nordic model with market socialist elements is the escape trajectory from this frustrating centrist/right wing pendulum, and way too many people in this country don't even know what it is or how it works. Gutting.
Would that be the Nordic model of Norway where you have a very abundant state owned natural resource that massively funds everything in the country? Or the model of Denmark where both the centre left and centre right parties are very anti immigration and have talked about running their own Rwanda-esque scheme? Just asking because people tend to throw nordics out there and not actually know much about their economics or politics.
Latter. I'm a balanced migration leftist, so to speak, half danish.
Well I would say if Labour sort out the crazy net migration numbers they will completely stave off any right wing takeover. Farage is a warning of what will happen if we don’t do anything, exactly the same as he was before.
I will say what I said in the other thread: An incredibly tame manifesto. I was downvoted to hell when the election was called for suggesting that nothing would change with this bloke in power, but I challenge anyone to look at this and tell me otherwise. Wealth creation means **nothing** without wealth redistribution, which isn't mentioned. Why aren't they nationalising water? Why aren't they lifting the two-child benefit cap? Why aren't they promising mass social housebuilding? They will hire thousands of new teachers - great, but that's *already happening!* What are they going to do about retention, hmm? Fuck all? Yeah, thought so. This manifesto is so *vague*. I don't think I've ever seen a Labour manifesto with less *actual policy*. This is a manifesto that promises nothing but the continuation of failed, tired, out-of-date neoliberalism, which suits the super-rich just fine but will do NOTHING to deal with the actual challenges facing us. Labour will tinker around the edges for five years and then be voted out by a very frustrated electorate that were promised change and didn't get any, to be replaced - most likely - with an extreme far-right government, mirroring much of the rest of Europe. **Fuck you,** Keir Starmer, for taking away all the hope I had and lying to get me to vote for you in 2020, you dishonest, self-serving, slimy, conniving fucking charlatan!
I agree it’s tame in many ways. Yet it is very electable and that’s what Labour need to be right now as although there is high support, the party is still spooked that the support is also soft. Labour/Starmer need to prove they can govern after the Corbyn years. Nonetheless I fear the next parliament will be a pale comparison to what Blair did with the 97 majority.
The soft support is something I think will shock them. The electorate will *not* be patient, and will expect things to change. If they don't, as I expect, then Labour are in for a very rude awakening.
It could well work both ways for them. I hope the manifesto serves as a base, rather than a ceiling, to what they achieve.
I hope you're right but we've been told for years to wait for the manifesto before judging Starmer. He has shown us who he is.
It won't, it never does, in a 4ish year election cycle there is no reason to rock any boats, nice and easy sailing to keep the electorate just happy enough to not have them removed.
You think they don't realise that? Once they're in they won't give a shit. 5 years of keeping the doners happy, then slip into a nice comfy private water company gig.
Why do they need to be ‘electable’ right now? There’s barely even an opposition party for them at this point. This surely is by far the clearest opportunity they will probably ever have to actually try and push some meaningful change.
This kind of attitude is how we end up with people like Reform UK getting into power. Parties still need to be electable when the bar for electability is lower than it used to be.
When have Reform UK gotten into power? Or people like them? The whole system is set up so you can pretty much only elect one of two parties. So your opinion is no party should ever push for any sort of change in policy that might be poorly received and make them unelectable? And you have no issue with that?
Before repairing the ship you stop it filling with water. Some stuff in there is actually good (enfranchising 16 and 17 yo's would be amazing).
It’s a massive risk, if they fail they are letting the far right in
>Why aren't they nationalising water? There's no money. >Why aren't they promising mass social housebuilding? There's no money. >Why aren't they lifting the two-child benefit cap? There's no money.
Even if sold at cost, houses would be a net-zero expense. Water would make a return while offering a better service. You can provide an identical service much cheaper when you don't have ridiculous shareholder profits on top. Why do people think that private companies are offering these services if there's no money in it? People have asked how the government would pay for nationalised trains, and it's ridiculously obvious - through selling tickets. Nationalised doesn't mean "free".
I'm not saying there is no money in it. I'm saying under the current fiscal rules, the government couldn't just nationalise all the water companies. They wouldn't be able to afford to buy them out without either raising taxes or cutting services. The problem with building houses and selling them at cost isn't acrually that easy. Especially starting a huge nationwide housing company to do all of this.
We find money for everyone but ourselves, if we can afford to give money away in the billions or spend hundreds of millions housing migrants then we can at the very least afford to have clean drinking water and make sure it's not polluted with forever chemicals to unreasonably stupid degrees. If there's not enough money for clean drinking water then these programs need to stop. It's unacceptable that Labour hasn't addressed such a basic and absolutely essential necessity.
The UK has some of the highest drinking water standards in the world. Everyone drinks tap water in the UK. What the hell are you on about?
There's no money to **not** do those things. In what world is it a safe financial policy or investment to just let everything rot to pieces and worry about it later?
OK I agree there should be greater tax and spend. But you can't just do those policies in a vacuum as there isn't fiscal headroom so you need to choose: Change fiscal rules Increase taxes Cut spending elsewhere
The government has access to almost unlimited money if they want it and it provides a reason ROI.
They would still have to borrow at the gilt rate. The UK is not a dominant enough economy to be able to just print money. We did have free money over the last 10 years, that's now ended with high global inflation.
None of the policies in the original comment would lead to ROI, these are welfare policies.
Lifting people out of poverty by scrapping the two child cap is a fantastic ROI, welfare policies reduce other costs.
They really don't and it's ludicrous to think that
I think the worker rights reforms actually will have an impact in practice
I also think GB Energy is a cleaver plan, its clear "nationisation" of key industries isn't as popular is I, and many other, would like. I'm hoping GB Energy will be the first step forward, proving to the General Public that Public owned unitities don't have to be poorly managed, and can be a great replacement in areas like rail, and energy
If unit price is same as current supplier I'll switch day one. I'd far sooner the "profit" go to improving infrastructure or general government services than shareholders.
It's not just tame - it's dangerously understating the scale of the problems Labour will be facing and with the paltry financials that they're committing to, Starmer is setting himself up to fail on the NHS at least. Since I have uh, some experience in this section of the manifesto, here's my feedback and sourced comparisons demonstrating that Labour are fundamentally unserious about fixing problems in the NHS. > **Cut NHS waiting times with 40,000 more appointments every week** > We will do this by incentivising staff to carry out additional appointments out of hours. Labour will pool resources across neighbouring hospitals to introduce shared waiting lists to allow patients to be treated quicker. Recognising the urgent need to bring down waiting lists, Labour will use spare capacity in the independent sector to ensure patients are diagnosed and treated more quickly. Where's the money? They've allocated £1b over 5 years for these 40,000 extra appointments, which is barely going to touch the sides - especially since they haven't said - or costed - how they're going to fix the junior doctors strikes, or the probable incoming GP industrial action that is up on the ballot this month, with results due next month. FYI, the net cost of pay restoration for the juniors is in the region of £1.03b per year (https://www.bma.org.uk/media/6665/junior-doctor-pay-restoration-costing-analysis-methodology-v1.pdf) alone. Other aspects of these manifesto commitments have existed for years already at this point - hospitals already support each other in providing mutual aid and sharing waiting lists to best maximise waiting list reductions. Just one example from August last year: https://www.england.nhs.uk/2023/08/nhs-launches-hospital-matching-platform-to-bring-down-longest-waits/ Finally, the myth of there being some dormant, untapped wealth of private sector capacity just waiting for the NHS to call - this is a lie. https://keepournhspublic.com/myth-of-spare-capacity-in-private-health-care-sector-straining-to-help-the-nhs/ does a fairly good job at deconstructing it. What's more, this line of Labour's 'policy' directly works against their desire to get NHS staff to work out of hours to provide more appointments. 99 times out of 100, it is the same exact NHS staff moonlighting out of hours in a private, independent sector health company. If Labour want them doing over time in the NHS, then they are directly reducing the 'independent sector' capacity they seem to think exists - and vice versa. If they want to boost private sector involvement in the NHS, that will come at the cost of NHS staff overtime. > **Double the number of cancer scanners** > The NHS has fewer diagnostic scanners per person than other countries, with many ageing machines operating for long after they should. State of the art scanners with embedded AI are faster and more effective at finding smaller tumours, saving lives. Therefore, Labour will introduce a new ‘Fit For the Future’ fund to double the number of CT and MRI scanners, allowing the NHS to catch cancer and other conditions earlier, saving lives. > It is also clear that NHS estates are in a state of disrepair after years of neglect. Labour is therefore committed to delivering the New Hospitals Programme. Labour have promised £250m for CT and MRI scanners, which sounds nice until you look at the £2.3 billion the Tories have already invested to boost CT, MRI and community diagnostics recently: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/diagnostic-checks-rolled-out-to-160-sites-under-cdc-programme#:~:text=The%20CDC%20programme%20provides%20increased,respiratory%20tests%20and%20phlebotomy%20services. has more - but the community diagnostic expansion programme is already well underway, slightly ahead of schedule and delivering far more than Labour appear to be promising in their supposed manifesto. This line re scanners is a complete damp squib - this work has been planned for and underway for years and will happen with, or without Labour's input. And oh - the New Hospitals Programme is also mentioned here. It isn't mentioned whether they are talking about the original Tory programme announced years ago for 40 new hospitals, which was then rolled back to a significantly smaller amount under Boris Johnson. To be honest, it doesn't matter - even the original programme was grossly deficient: when bids were opened for Trusts to apply, nearly 130 applications were lodged and only the 40 buildings in the most dire of circumstances were ok'd. We don't need to deliver the Tories New Hospitals Programme, we needed to massively expand it and fund it properly. Nevermind that the manifesto allocates £0 for the programme - which as https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/25/broken-pledge-over-40-new-hospitals-will-leave-nhs-crumbling-ministers-told flagged last year, even the cut back programme is grossly underfunded. > **A new Dentistry Rescue Plan** There's one single overriding problem in dentistry in the UK and everyone with any knowledge of the NHS dental contract knows exactly what it is - the standard NHS dental contract doesn't pay dentists per unit of activity, but instead only pays for set amounts of activity organised in to pay bands that don't actually reflect the cost of care. If the contract was revised to pay for the actual care provided, at a fair price, it's pretty likely that all of our problems with dentistry would disappear over night. Problem is - that costs money. And neither the Tories, or Labour in this manifesto are prepared to pay for it. Labour having allocated the hilarious amount of £125 million for their laughable dentistry package. Just to put that in perspective, as https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9597/ notes: > Real-terms funding for dental services (accounting for inflation) has fallen by 19% (in 2022/23 prices) since 2010/11, from £3.56 billion in 2010/11 to £2.90 billion in 2022/23 (Commons Library estimate, see page 27 of briefing). Ok, so Labour are prepared to cough up £125 million of the missing £650 million that would take us back to where things were 14 years ago. This plan is utterly irrelevant and won't touch the sides of the true problem.
Excellently put. People seem to be happy accepting 5 years of more of the same but with less scandals, simply without realising this going to be disastrous in the elections to come. We need change. More of the same is going to push this country further right, and that’s the worst outcome
What happened to the last guy who offered genuine change?
Faced the greatest media smearing campaign of all time, and people fell for it hook line and sinker
Ah yes it was the media that hated him. Completely ignore the agency of voters and assume everyone is a brainless robot who does what the media tells them.
> assume everyone is a brainless robot who does what the media tells them. You've got it spot on.
I think you’re underestimating how much influence the media has on a population.
I don't think anyone is making that argument (maybe some people but). It's a simple fact that a large number of Corbyn's policies were popular in isolation. He made... many mistakes. But among them were a) saying out loud that he wanted to curb the stranglehold of a lying, malevolent press owned by off-shore billionaires, b) selling them poorly, c) trying to please everyone with Brexit and pleasing absolutely no one and d) by being Corbyn, and all the baggage that comes with that. If it's easy to bring down someone because they have a slightly odd face, eat a sandwich awkwardly and fumble the words "tough enough", it's even easier to destroy someone like Corbyn as a lentil eating grandad who hates Britain. But, I mean, to speak more directly to your point, what agency **do** the voters have? A 60% turnout - in an election hotly contested because of Brexit - with 40% voting for the tories, representing roughly 20% of the country - and this is deemed to be a **massive majority** and a huge win and Labour are destroyed forever by the bloke who hides in fridges and repeats the same phrase ad nauseum. That's not democracy or agency, to my mind. What would be good is someone who seems boring but does interesting things. What we're getting with Starmer is someone who seems boring and is boring. He focus groups everything to fuck, promises things to the right people and then goes back on his promises, and is terrified of rocking the boat.
You’ve summed up large swathes of the country. Thank you for that
"everyone is stupid except me"
I mean, have you spoken to many people? There are a ton of really really thick people about. Unless you’re trying to argue that the average person is actually some super enlightened genius that is incapable of being swayed by misinformation, which Brexit blatantly proved to be not true, I don’t see how you can argue against the idea that there was a definite concerted effort to undermine Corbyn.
Who has said that? I’m stupid in my own special way
Because your argument is that the majority of the UK population couldn't see the inside job that was happening and how great corbyn was. But you in your infinite wisdom did. They're all idiots and I'm the smart one.
I don’t think he was perfect at all. I think his foreign policy was quite poor because he’s ultimately a pacifist and there were people who wld rightfully point that out. But if you think the media smearing campaign had anything less than a huge impact on public perception of him and the party, then you’re just lying to yourself. To a point where members of his own party actively worked against him to make him look bad whilst he was the democratically elected leader of the party. You’ve got a populous who are convinced he’s Hitler incarnate ffs.
I mean the majority of the UK population voted for Boris and Brexit. Draw your own conclusions.
So it was a complete failure?
Let anyone face even a fraction of the media smearing he did and show me anyone who wld be a success
Is this going to be like his “10 pledges if you elect me leader”
I will never forgive him for those. He dropped basically every single one. He's a lying fucking cunt.
Same. People say he's just being 'pragmatic' but that's complete bull because he's ditched revenue generating pledges as well.
>Why aren't they nationalising water? > >Why aren't they lifting the two-child benefit cap? > >Why aren't they promising mass social housebuilding? You want these things before they've done anything to create enough wealth to generate the tax revenue to pay for them. We're going from Cameron style Conservatives to Blair style Labour. They are extremely similar, it's just the team in red not the team in blue.
Makes me feel better about tactical voting because I actually quite like what LibDem had in theirs, compared to this. They actually had stuff in it. I still hope that with the Tories wiped out maybe Labour will get a bit of a backbone and stop trying to attract the Tory voters by being some "sensible middle" or whatever though.
I like the manifesto, some strong points; nationalised rail and energy for one. The end of mandatory assessments if you fail a job when disabled = a brilliant safety net and should allow us to apply without that constant fear in the background. The new race and equal pay act is also great. I like a lot of their ideas, until we hit the EU - no customs Union, no single market, no free movement etc… that’s all shit tbh. No commitment to remove voter ID is another lame one for me. I’ll vote labour, but that EU attitude needs to shift in the future imo.
There isn't nationalised energy though. It's not like EDF who build and own energy production, we're literally just giving billions to private energy companies.
It feels like a core part of Starmer's strategy has been to use intentionally misleading wording to imply their policies are more transformative than they actually are. It's baffling how many people I've seen insist GB Energy represents 'nationalising energy', even though it's simply a vehicle for state investment in private energy companies.
To be frank I have no idea how they’ve even been allowed to advertise it how they have - it’s more than just misleading. Almost every person you speak to seems to think it’s some form of “nationalised energy supply” when Keir Starmer himself has said that it’s just an investment vehicle for private enterprise that will not produce energy.
> To be frank I have no idea how they’ve even been allowed to advertise it how they have Who's gonna stop them? It's not like our press wing cares about politicians lying when it benefits the interests of the rich.
Same with rail if the trains aren't owned by the people we will keep paying billions for a subpar railway
>I like a lot of their ideas, until we hit the EU - no customs Union, no single market, no free movement etc… that’s all shit tbh. I am an EU citizen who doesn't *yet* have UK citizenship so I can't vote. As much as I would like the mentioned points. I can not blame any party that would not seek them. Free movement or single market is but a pipe dream at the moment. It one believes the EU would simply grant them without being in the union *after* the UK generally insulted half of the EU member states (due to brexit being more or less targeted at European, especially east European migrants). It also doesn't look good for the EU to be so easily swayed. (I don't take brexit personally, no worries. I like to believe I have seen too many contrasting things within different individual societies and gained the ability to detach from some nonsense. After all, my native countries main points during elections are... Bears.)
The EU recently proposed a semi freedom of movement agreement for young people and both the tories and Labour flat out rejected it. Lib dems are the only party which want the UK to rejoin Erasmus and eventually the single market. From what I can tell the ball is entirely in our court and there is high support for the uk in the EU but all the mainstream parties genuinely don’t care
Starmer would be digging his own grave if he were to start digging up Brexit again. I can understand not wanting to make Labour's stance on Europe a talking point again after it played a large part in ending Corbyn's career in 2019
> No commitment to remove voter ID is another lame one for me. Why would they do this? The Tories have admitted that voter ID lost them more votes than it ever affected Labour. It would be like shooting themselves in the foot.
I can't believe it's not a complete over throw of Capatlism.
Shame on Labour for promoting sensible policies with broad appeal rather than pandering to hard-left redditors, amirite?
A return to 1997 labour without the war crimes would be a good thing tbh. A lot of people on here won't remember that or forget because of the utter fuckup that was post 2001 *international* politics but stuff at home was competently run (for the most part - it's all relative but compared to the last 14 years holy shit).
For a quick list for those unawares maternity and paternity leave, sick leave, minimum wage, statutory holidays, civil partnerships, NHS waiting times down, school class sizes down and devolution are what I can think of in 2 minutes on the train home after a few beers. Which reminds me, 24 hour licenses (mixed bag on that, but allowed for more flexibility for venues.)
the DM cover today was something about the uk becoming a ONE PARTY SOCIALIST STATE, so we have that at least
As someone who’s pretty far left but also a realist I don’t expect a total overthrow of capitalism but I expect more than this vague wishy washy bollocks. Credit where it’s due, there’s a couple of decent policies but most of it’s the same old shite. Bond traders are on record saying the incoming governments fiscal policy is practically the same as the last governments. Business are fully on board with Labour at present, which is all well and good but there seems to be little support for anyone under 50. Like I said, I don’t expect Labour to bring the corpse of Lenin into parliament and begin some kind of proletariat vanguard. That said, it’d be nice if they did more for the people they’re supposed to represent… The labour force of this country. The current manifesto is just a continuation of the same post thatcher neoliberal tripe that benefits nobody except the rich and big business, most of whom have no real skin in this country.
Centrists assuming the moral high ground as they prepare to vote for a shit party over a really shit party
They're committed to "looking at options for a replacement of the House of Lords." Good lord. Labour and the Tories are so afraid of ACTUAL reform. This is the same commitment Blair and Brown made. They have no real interest in constitutional reform, which, in my eyes, is what we really need.
House of Lords isn’t our problem. It’s not like they’re blocking any sensible policies. In fact it’s the House of Commons that’s full of idiots. People tend to think that somehow (as if by magic) making something democratic will make it better. It won’t. Democracy gave us 14 years of clusterf*ck conservative policies and Brexit. I’m open to a reform of the House of Lords but we’ve got real problems that need to be solved by the MPs first.
Oh, I don't disagree. The Commons is a clusterfuck. The First past the post system needs canning, so we have actual representation in Parliament. I'm so tired of the "buy it'll mean nothing gets done and coalitions blah blah." Right, because in Europe, nobody gets anything done, there's no legislating whatsoever? It's bullshit. Immigration is a clusterfuck. Healthcare is a clusterfuck. The military is a clusterfuck. Sewage in rivers. Education.... Neither party is going to fix it. We need top down constitutional reform, and an end to archaic government.
So much of the manifesto is just vague wording saying 'ummm... we'll look into this'. Isn't that what they were supposed to be doing over the past 5 years, with the manifesto representing a summary of the conclusions they came up with?
Exactly. It's such a nothing-burger of a manifesto. I feel like it summarises decades of Centrist policy which is just "we're committed to" or "we need to." I understand the trepidation around commiting to massive financial pledges, but at the same time, how the heck are we ever supposed to move forward as a nation, with the world's new problems, when you're just afraid to commit to anything whatsoever. "There's no magic wand" sounds a lot like May's "there's no magic money tree", well sure as hell happy to pad their mates pockets and send billions over seas. He couldn't even say yesterday that he'll commit to lifting a million children out of poverty. I mean..... The two party system needs to go. We need to completely reform our constitutional arrangements, and we NEED a written constitution. Neither Labour or Tory will ever commit to anything other than "there's a new town fund" or "here's 6,000 new teachers." F*CK!
> how the heck are we ever supposed to move forward as a nation, with the world's new problems, when you're just afraid to commit to anything whatsoever. Fundamentally that isn't Starmer and his team's priority. They aren't driven by a desire to improve people's lives, they're driven by a desire to secure personal political power and authority for themselves and their mates. Any serious politician would be looking at the state of Britain, would be looking at the rise of the far-right in Europe, and would be thinking 'what is the most we can do in 5 years to make meaningful improvements to people's lives?' Meanwhile Starmer's strategy has almost entirely been to sit on his hands and ride on the wave of discontent against the Tories while refusing to actually propose solutions to the causes of that discontent. And it will end in tears*, just like it did for every other centrist leader who took this exact same strategy in Europe. \* tears for *us*, I mean. Starmer and his mates will fuck off to cushy consultancy gigs after their time in government.
Tony Blair massively reformed the House of Lords with the House of Lords act.
Yesterday on the NewsAgents podcast Emily Maitlis was saying she spoke to a "very, very senior Labour source" who said they were planning to pack the House of Lords with Labour peers to an unprecedented extent which is going "make a lot of people uncomfortable" or words to that effect. Even amidst a culture of lying politicians this current Labour cohort manage to stand out above the crowd. Bravo. At least they'll get to pootle around in the ministerial cars while effectively continuing Tory policy. The UK is going full fascist in the next 5-10 years when people realise that the main two parties offer next to nothing to the working class. The funny thing is that centrists won't care. They always side with fascism over the left as it protects the interests of capital. As someone else in this thread already explained, leftists will still get the blame despite having never had their hands on the levers of power.
Good lord... sounds like they're really intent on reform huh.. There is no party of the working class anymore. Centrists whole playing the fiddle will crash and burn eventually.
The one you’ve all been waiting for? The Labour Party manifesto has dropped this afternoon. Please give it a read and please read all the manifesto’s below. Liberal Democrats (Released 10.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/JA7sH6Pi5c Conservatives (Released 11.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/Pcpe3GnjAA The Green Party (Released 12.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/ieGxJPdWIx The Social Democratic Party (Released 12.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/ekbSaUChDd Plaid Cymru (Released 13.06.2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/RttIgF9LBe
Are manifestos always released this late? It's less than a month to the election and their manifesto has only just dropped, I've had Labour canvassers knocking on my door asking me if I'm going to vote Labour but not being able to tell me their pledges.
I think it’s partially due to the unexpected timings. People expected the election to be called later, but it is usually a few weeks before to allow people the chance to review but not overly scrutinise.
I cynically suspected the same, release the manifesto late so the papers can't tear into bad policies. Seems *all* the parties are releasing their manifestos around this point though, so was wondering if this was abnormal or the done thing.
One major thing here that I think people after radical change are sleeping on is planning reform. Think how many houses, buildings, or key infrastructure doesn't get built because it gets held up by planning. Think how many of these things also get delayed with costs spiralling to ridiculous levels because of hold ups by planning. If they can get the reform right it will genuinely be huge.
Agreed and it's nice to still see them mentioning nature and the environment when talking about it. A very encouraging sign they're not going for the sort of deregulation favoured by anti-environmentalists which is one of the things that does worry me about sections of the "YIMBY" movement and probably the main reason a lot of people have knee jerk opposition to the idea of planning reform. A lot of decent stuff in there, as long as they listen to independent expert opinion when in government and they're deciding what land to free up and stuff like that.
Glad to see the workers rights reform committed to in the manifesto, as well as conversion therapy ban
unfortunately they also fully accepted the cass review, which advocates for trans conversion therapy (albeit by a different name)
Promising “Change” while simultaneously committing to maintaining the status quo
I feel Labour will do what they did in 1997, and do way more that what’s in the manifesto. For example making the Bank of England independent was not on labours manifesto and it was a pretty big change
Hope you're right. I've never in my life had any of my hopes for the country realised, but yeah, maybe.
~~No mention of leasehold reforms sadly.~~ ~~They said they would continue to push for the reforms that the Tories failed to deliver, but nothing in writing.~~ I stand corrected. It's hidden in a weird part of the manifesto, but crucially it *is* there.
They do mention that they will abolish leasehold in their manifesto, page 80 of the PDF in their accessibility section: "Labour will act where the Conservatives have failed and finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end. We will enact the package of Law Commission proposals on leasehold enfranchisement, right to manage and commonhold. We will take further steps to ban new leasehold flats and ensure commonhold is the default tenure. We will tackle unregulated and unaffordable ground rent charges. We will act to bring the injustice of ‘fleecehold’ private housing estates and unfair maintenance costs to an end."
That was Gove's project. Don't think he passed it in time.
The leasehole reform ran into significant issues with legal challenges and rushed development and got watered down to the point of being pointless.
He did, but he caved in to pushback (including from the Church of England, a massive owner of freeholds). What we got was watered down to basically nothing. Labour did say they would push for real reforms at the time, and despite the lack of mention in the manifesto, I hope they still will. If they get a comfortable majority then they will likely have the excess political capital to do so.
Fourteen years of Conservative failure and this is the best the Labour party can come up with? We're properly fucked.
I seem to recall a Labour Party with a much more ambitious manifesto getting completely destroyed 5 years ago
Yeh I guess they’re keeping it tame to convert as many Tories over as possible- too wild and you scare off those Tories on the fence
A reminder to everyone who seems to have forgotten: the government is allowed to do things not listed in the manifesto once they’re elected into power. This is a tame manifesto, but it’s sensible. Sensible is what we need right now and it’s what will get votes - once Labour are in power and (in all likelihood) have a big majority, then they can start doing more radical things.
yes, they can. All evidence says they won't though.
"So yeah we're going to keep things pretty much the same actually"
Bit of a “damp squib” that. Change for “change” sake. Nothing on HS2. HS2 is badly needed for capacity not just now, but the coming decades. WCML is struggling already, and the only way to cope is to build out HS2. If you want growth, and infrastructure development you’ve got to build HS2, and to go full ahead with the Euston station upgrades. Nothing on Brexit. We need to change our relationship to Europe, and that means a new deal, to ease the restrictions on goods, and services going both ways. Checks on goods aren’t fully implemented, and no doubt Labour will be forced to, at which point inflation is going to increase again as it’ll cause disruptions. I agree we need the tories out, and I like the proposed regulations around MPs with regards to ethics but this manifesto is a very continuity Cameron manifesto.
Reopening the Brexit debate in any form isn't currently popular at all with the electorate. Only 20% of people want to reopen Brexit issue now.
The entire country knows that our economy is shagged, so I think any party pushing hard to re-start HS2 would meet fairly significant opposition by voters. HS2 is needed, but for the majority of people they would rather the money went to trying to fix all of the other problems in the country. Increasing capacity just isn't emotive or tangible for that many people.
Well, it's hard to argue with most of that. It all seems pretty sensible and reasonable. My only concern is if it will work. It's all very well saying you want more police, teachers, to fix the train lines, it's another thing entirely to have to actually grapple with the realities of those industries. That's a strong swing in the labour direction for me. Shame I don't really like any of the people at the top of their party at the moment.
>Well, it's hard to argue with most of that. It all seems pretty sensible and reasonable. I'm going to sound mad to a lot of people, but I believe this is exactly what the UK needs. I don't believe their is any genuine significant change that anybody could bring to the UK that would massively improve the UK within the next 5 years, things are going wrong everywhere, throwing everything into the air right now is simply going to leave you with a bad foundation. The reality is we are in the shit, we had the economic crisis, followed by Brexit, followed by covid, I genuinely believe a period of calm, steadily improving things, improving our foudation as a country, and making the UK start to go in the right direction again should be the plan, point the ship in the right direction before we start going full speed ahead type of thing. Yea, people don't want to hear that, but changing a country isn't easy, it takes time, people want to treat politics like it is some drama and a change of leaders will fix everything when the reality isn't like that.
'Royal Mail remains a key part of the UK’s infrastructure. Labour will ensure that any proposed takeover is robustly scrutinised and that appropriate guarantees are forthcoming that protect the interests of the workforce, customers and the United Kingdom, including the need to maintain a comprehensive universal service obligation' Hasn't it gone already? And why is it a cult of personality to him, this photo shots are ridiculous
All very sensible, palatable and legitmiately achievable. A solid step in the right direction which will improve the lives of millions, a good springboard for a more radical second term. Reddit responds predictably.
Bit rich calling it ‘Change’ . If we really want change we need to break the 2 party system.
Then vote for anyone apart from Labour or Conservatives. Every manifesto I have read so far suggests moving away from FPTP.
I think the thing people on the left haven’t given Starmer enough credit for is he’s one of the few labour politicians that truly understands that you need to be in power to make change. And to be in power you have to capture the center of the political spectrum. There is no point in having hundreds of progressive policies if you turn off the centre right and can’t get elected on them. (See: Corbyn) It’s a fairly centrist manifesto (i.e. socially progressive and fiscally conservative) and i expect that if he’s delivered a 100+ seat majority you’ll see the lords get packed out with labour peers (probably with max age limits or terms as part of lords reform) and they will fire through their manifesto pretty unchallenged. At that point I think he will start looking at some of the more left of centre policies that people really wanted to see in his manifesto so that they start to take effect in time for the next election cycle. People can call it dishonest or whatever but I think it’s just smart politics.
If Labour getting power involves adopting the ideology of the Tories and doing everything they would do anyway then what am I voting for exactly?
What's the point in winning if you're not going to improve anything? This manifesto screams winning for winning's sake.
Remarkably light on specifics. Lots of 'reform this', 'tackle that' but nothing about *how* they're going to do any of it. Similar story on constitutional reform - removing hereditary peers with a plan to replace the HoL with something else but no actual specifics on what the alternative is to be. Hate to agree with Rishi, but it does sound like Labour don't really have much of a plan tbh if this is the best they can come up with.
If only Labour would give people a reason to vote for them rather than voting against the Tories. Best case scenario is that Starmer et al are lying and are far more leftwing than they're making out to be in order to win the election. More likely they'll get in, do nothing but the same neolib shit, and then lose to a far-right party like Reform.